Video is currently being transitioned from an analog medium to a digital medium. For example, the old analog NTSC television broadcasting standard is slowly being replaced by the digital ATSC television broadcasting standard. Similarly, analog video cassette tapes are increasingly being replaced by digital versatile discs (DVDs). Thus, it is important to identify efficient methods of digitally encoding video information. An ideal digital video encoding system will provide a very high picture quality with the minimum number of bits.
The pre-processing of video sequences can be an important part of digital video encoding systems. A good video pre-processing system can achieve a bit rate reduction in the final compressed digital video streams. Furthermore, the visual quality of the decoded sequences is often higher when a good pre-processing system has been applied as compared to that obtained without pre-processing. Thus, it would be beneficial to design video pre-processing systems that will alter a video sequence in a manner that will improve the compression of the video sequence by a digital video encoder.